Garageland, Do What You Want
"We just came out of nowhere, looks like we're heading back there"
Yep, the new-formula
Garageland have (ahem) Come Back to the suburban New Zealand wasteland that so fuelled their Eastie 'tudes
last time 'round, recording the follow-up long player at fellow ex-expat Neil Finn's Roundhead studios.
"moving away from all this deadwood, moving away from the trouble next door"
Now residing in Tooting, England, Garageland Mk II is a sophisticated cosmopolitan beast with US radio play and a
top-100 success in the UK. But they're still that poptastic guitar combo we knew and loved in '96. With
'Not Empty' and 'Trashcans' already embedded in the national consciousness (the latter even used as background music
on Shortland Street!) and 'Kiss It All Goodbye' set to follow suit, Garageland certainly haven't lost that notorious
knack for a tune. But unlike 'Last Exit', these songs can stand alone, not merely propped up my those magical hooks.
Clanger brings a special something to the mix (apart from some disturbing twangs on 'Love Song'--think Dire Straits doing 'Struck').
An urgent, overdriven guitar perfectly augmenting the Garageland sound, making it bigger, brighter and ballsier than before.
Martin Phillipps, Sketchbook vol.1
Alone in his house with a deteriorating Tascam four-track, the Chills' notoriously difficult frontman spent the best part of seven years intermittently tinkering on these home recordings. Coinciding with the Soft Bomb/Submarine Bells-era recordings, brilliantly complementing Phillipps' Chills output.
Maybe the dye from all those years of black shirts has seeped into Martin's brain a little--this is an eccentric collection, idiosyncratic in extreme. 'Evadene' and 'Residential Green Cell' (dedicated to the acid-fried hippy popster Syd Barrett, no less) are as delightfully unstable as their subjects. Experimental, fractured, songs without starts or ends or (sometimes) even middles; 'Spring segment' is a fragment of some Vivaldiesque seasonal tribute. 'Witch's Hat', meanwhile, tumbles into a perversely childish playground chant.
The man who used to put Greenpeace contacts on his liner notes here lilts an elegant environmental lament on 'No More Tigers'. That distinctive Chills jangle courses through 'February', an icy breeze through fine summer pop. And 'Bad Dancer' could be filed beside the neglected dozens of would-be Chills classics ('Wet Blanket' or 'Double Summer', for example) for its blissfully naive melodies.
The "volume one" title is a promising sign. Surely Martin has more musical gams squirreled away. Maybe even some he'd like to share. For Flying Nun afficionados and Chills fans, this album is the essential companion piece.
Subliminals, The Crystal Chain EP
Ever-strange bedfellows to HDU's sonic symphonics, the Subliminals quite simply defy description. Theirs' is a world of astounding, enchanting, even seductive soundscapes. Coersive, subversive, pervading the minds and invading the subconscious with an eddying, gurgling, ebbing and flowing aural vortex of swirling hurly-burly whirls. A flurry of pure prismatic intensity, vibrant tumbling kaleidoscopic cascades of sensation and spectacle. A head-on collision of sparse, intricate minimalism and creeping, weary washes of subtle yielding delicacy. Witness, say, Compulsion Engine's hurtling urgency compared to the title track's dawdling lustrous langour.
From Travelogue, a psychedelic snake-charmers' serenade, to the meandering catatonic stagger of The Oxygen Chamber, the Subliminals' architected musings are woven with snatches of mumbled, fumbled abstract ramblings. Words carried aloft on billowing anthems, another shimmering facet on these razor-sharp crystalline shards of sound.
Not only the instruments but the whole Subliminals sound seems electrified, wired, humming with its own innate lifeforce as an alluring, indescribable, incomprehensible melange of mellifluous musical melodrama.
Bird Nest Roys, Bird Nest Roys (FNE19 CD)
Machetes in hand, humming vaguely along to R.E.M. and the Clean's 'Quickstep', the Bird Nest Roys hack their way deep into the pop wilderness and emerge with 11 remarkable tales to tell (the compact disc reviewed here includes 3 bonus tracks, the equally strange fruit of another expedition). The Roys' charm never stales throughout this, their first (and only) album - a shamefully overlooked classic that bubbles over dangerously with peculiarly surreal popscapes. There are plenty of really delicious harmonies here, especially on the opener 'Five Weetbix And Toast', while the menacing 'Joringel' and lively stomp of 'Bided' demonstrate the band's versatility. 'Jaffa Boy' combines an endearing innocence ("He just needs to know if he can play with me, show me all the things he saw on TV") with pensively jangly guitar and tambourine. Elsewhere, stubbornly bizarre lyrics subvert the cheery nasal vocal and mello muzak of 'Ain't Mutatin' and provide 'Alien' with a delightful singalong chorus ("You've got to love your alien!"). The disc ends in style with an excellent live cover of Golden Harvest's 'I Need Your Love'. Penny sweets and swirling vortexes on the back cover sum up the Bird Nest Roys experience well - you have no idea where you might end up, but there are plenty of treats on the way there...
--Nony*
